I turned 50 earlier this year, which makes it hard to deny my approaching old age. This is the era when, in principle, I should be sliding into full Grumpy Old Man mode, ordering people off my lawn and complaining that the music the kids listen to these days is just noise, noise I tell you! Instead, I seem to find myself getting increasingly genial.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate some of the Top 40 pop that I have to listen to in the car with the kids— happily, The Pip doesn’t like Megan Theeeeee Stallion any more than I do, so I can flip away from her, but there are a couple of Lil Nas X tracks he likes that make me want to drive into a tree. Most of it, though, is… fine. They’re not timeless classics for the most part, but neither were most of the songs I listened to back in my Top 40 phase in the 1980’s. Most are unobjectionable, many are well-crafted, a handful are really good.
I find myself being less bothered by other people’s garbage Takes on pop culture, as well. I was thinking about this because I spent a good chunk of the holiday weekend watching Get Back on Disney+ (I am a white guy Of A Certain Age, as noted above), and reading commentary about it. Most of the professional reviews have been pretty reasonable, engaging with the film on its own terms (more or less) and talking about the insights it offers into the process of creativity, and relationships within the band, etc.
The Internet being what it is, though, there’s also been a fair bit of garbage, mostly from random young people, declaring that the Beatles are nothing compared to pop stars of today, or that the buzz about the movie is some kind of generational oppression, or even that the mere existence of the movie is somehow racist. These are all somewhere between worthless and absurd, and on some level, I ought to be really annoyed by them. Instead, I find myself just kind of shrugging and moving along: “That’s nice for you. Have a lovely day.”
Some of this grows out of years and years of liking things that are unpopular— science fiction novels, guitar-driven rock, The Wheel of Time— and not liking things that are popular— comic book movies, hip-hop, Succession. After a few decades, getting worked up every time somebody sneers at a thing I enjoy just isn’t sustainable, and getting into quixotic fights about how the things other people like actually suck holds little appeal. I’ve learned to shrug and change the subject as a way to preserve my sanity.
This has been really accelerated in the last decade or so, though, by the more widespread adoption of the position that what you like is a reliable indication of the quality of your character. This mostly shows up through the use of particular works or creators as signifiers of Bad People: somebody tweets that their date said he liked David Foster Wallace, and all their followers nod sagely and reply-tweet a bunch of red-flag emojis.
And, you know, there’s no small amount of self-interest in my negative reaction to this, because I’m someone who likes the book Infinite Jest and who’s excited for this weekend’s series of shows by The Hold Steady (another pop-culture fandom sometimes used as a shorthand for a certain kind of person that’s okay to look down on). But to a large extent that helps make clear the absurdity of the whole enterprise of assigning moral weight to aesthetic tastes. The idea that liking (or not liking) a particular bit of pop culture usefully marks someone out as a Bad Person should’ve stayed associated with the emotionally stunted man-children of High Fidelity. Hearing that sort of thing presented unironically by supposedly insightful cultural commentators has become a red flag in its own right for me, marking someone whose opinions I don’t need to consider all that seriously.1
That de-weighting in turn makes it more difficult to get all that worked up about my own pop-cultural preferences. Having recognized the absurdity of someone sweeping me up into the category of Terrible People for my tastes in books and music, I can’t very well turn around and do the same in the opposite direction. Well, OK, I guess I could, given the huge number of examples of people who do exactly that kind of thing, but I’m a little too self-aware to be comfortable doing that. Which then leads to a general softening of all my opinions, and a trend toward geniality rather than grumpiness. At least with regard to culture— there’s no shortage of clouds that I’ll yell at (skim back through the archives of this Substack for proof), but I try to keep that stuff in the realm of actual policy, not ephemeral aesthetic choices.
That’s not to say that all opinions have equal worth or anything— if someone’s out here declaring that the Beatles are worthless, I’m not exactly in a rush to click through to read their Top Ten Albums of 2021. But that’s because these are expressions of taste, not character— someone with a garbage Take on the Beatles has tastes in music that are so far from mine that their other opinions are unlikely to provide me any useful information at all. It doesn’t mark them as a Bad Person, any more than liking the Beatles would mark them as good.
So, even though I’m old enough for my kids to think I pre-date the game “Tag,” I find myself becoming less a Grumpy Old Man, and more of a genially Abiding Dude. Which can be kind of exhausting in an social-media discourse environment that often seems to be heading in the opposite direction at relativistic speeds, but, you know…
This is probably not the greatest advertisement for getting people to sign on to read more of my commentary on the issues of the day, but it is what it is. Should you be so moved, here are some buttons:
And if you want to yell at me about my bad tastes, I guess you can do that in the comments.
Because this is the Internet, I will add the obligatory disclaimer that there is, of course, a line that can be crossed, here. I would agree that someone expressing genuine admiration for works that explicitly endorse the oppression of particular groups or seriously advocate the violent overthrow of society is most likely a person of questionable character. That’s lunatic fringe stuff, though; I’m talking about broadly mainstream works of culture, here.